Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).
Interesting that you should mention that. The engineering program at my local university exists almost entirely because of a huge endowment that my company made. We fund many scholarships and hire at least a hundred interns every year, just at one site - and rougly 75% of those interns receive job offers upon graduation.
However, a degree does not make experience, particularly in the area of signal integrity engineering. Even so, we have hired interns as full time engineers - three of them in the past five years. However, it's not possible to have a well-developed signal integrity program without engineers who have many years of experience.
Since you obviously aren't familiar with the field, I can tell you that, typically, a signal integrity engineer stays with the same company for years - often for his or her entire career. Experience is precious in the field and companies work to keep those engineers.
As far as the donating business setting the curriculum, that's not really true. The curriculum, at least for a BSEE, is fairly standard from school to school and is set to meet the standards of the ACE. Speaking from experience, there is very little room in an undergraduate engineer's schedule to provide meaningful university training in a specific field. We do use internships and co-op programs to fill in knowledge that we require, but a year-long internship is not the same as a year of full-time work experience - and it's nothing like the 5+ years of experience that we really look for in a simulation engineer.
Fortunately, we can use H1B visas to make up for the lack of experienced engineers who don't want to leave the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest.
We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.
It's a shame, too, because you guys who won't consider anything more than 200 miles inland are missing out.
IT guys I don't know so much about - all of them (except for the freakin' loud Scottish guy) that I see around my building are from the US.
To use your own example you don't simulate in flight emergencies on real flights. You do it in a controlled environment usually in a simulator. If you don't have access to that or want to do more realistic simulations you're very careful about recovery conditions (eg. you simulate an engine failure by throttling back to idle, but you don't actually cut your engine).
Unfortunately, there are plenty of situations where training has to occur in situ for it to be realistic. Obviously you're not going to perform in situ training that creates a life or death situation and this case wasn't one. At worst, it has the potential to create a very inconvenient situation and I guess that this case turned out to be just that.
As an example of in situ training, when I served in the US Navy, we had the capability of injecting simulated sensor data into the real-time sensor stream of our sonar system. The data is indistinguishable from the real thing, so the potential exists for that information to go out over the world-wide tactical data system. It was an excellent tool for training and to make sure that operators were actually paying attention to the screen - generally speaking, on a surface ship sonar watches are brutally boring, unless there is an actual target to prosecute. The downside to the tool is that if it's not used properly, a whole lot of panic can ensue for a short time (and, since shit rolls downhill...)
That particular training tool was very successful, by the way. It increased the proficiency of the operators significantly.
I should have asked if it was random or not, but at those moments, the desire to not irritate the people with the power to make your day go badly overrides my curiosity.
I asked - I couldn't help myself. It's both random and if there's suspicion of funny business. I travel with some medical equipment in a small case. It almost always gets the sniffer treatment because it looks a little suspicious. Now and then my briefcase gets the same treatment. After a couple of times of that, I asked. They pick every X number of bags to sniff, plus anything that the X-ray screener flags.
Oh boy, you just opened the door for the clove cigarette smoking, beret wearing theorists to start expounding their utterly improbably drivel about the nature of man in the consumer society.
Air America needs them to listen to their radios instead of reading/. - how dare you?
Your last sentence makes my point. If you own one share of Microsoft, you own it - a share. You own a share that represents some fraction of the value of the company. But what do you own? A tire on one of the company cars? A few cases of paper? A copy of Windows XP? Even if you owned a controlling interest, what do you own? You own an abstraction of the value of the company. Can you take your share of Microsoft stock to Redmond and ask for your 10e-9th fraction of the assets of the company? Nope. But you can sell that abstraction to somebody else.
The stock represents the assets, profits and losses of the company. It implies ownership, but it is not ownership in the classic sense. You own a share of MSFT. You own and interest in MSFT. Maybe you even own a controlling interest in MSFT. But what do you own? What can you do with that portion of MSFT that you claim you own? Well...nothing, really. You can vote your proxy, I guess, but that's about it. Oh, and you can sell it. But you can't touch the assets that are owned by Microsoft. So who really owns the assets?
Your argument that MS is merely an organizational construct is also a red herring. Volition, sentience - that has nothing to do with ownership. Here's another example of why you're wrong. I owned several houses. I transferred the title to those houses to a corporation. My wife and I own the corporation. The corporation owns the houses. Do I own 50% of the houses? No - I own 50% of the corporation. I can direct the disposal of the assets of the corporation, but they are not my direct assets. If I sell the houses, turn it all into cash, then I own a corporation that has a lot of cash. But which dollar is mine and which is my wife's? What can I do with the assets of that corporation? Can I just take the money and run? Believe me, if I started dipping into the assets of the corporation by using the excuse that I own 50% of it, so 50% of its assets are mine, there will be legal (not to mention tax) trouble like you wouldn't believe! On the other hand, I can, under certain circumstances, sell my 50% interest in the corporation, the value of which may or may not be limited purely to the value of the houses.
As a corporate officer, I still have to pay the bills on behalf of the corporation. But that does not make the assets of the corporation my assets, nor does it diminish the corporation's ownership of its assets. Same with your stock.
The bottom line is that stock is merely an abstraction of the company.
Oh, and the first line of my original reply was sarcasm.
Yeah, and the gold fringe around the flag means that it's an admiralty court, so it has no jurisdiction over you.
Every expense is part of the profit/loss statement. No surprise there. But this isn't a commodity business, so prices don't move in direct relation to those expenses. If all that it took to deal with an increase in expenses was a corresponding increase in prices, then no company would ever post a loss. The hitch in that plan is that most pricing is driven by the marketplace as opposed to being simply a "cost plus" proposition.
The whole wealth and class warfare business is just a red herring. You can apply the same rhetoric to any expense that a company pays. It's just the cost of doing business. If your costs are low enough, you make money. If they're not, you lose money. In a competitive market, the margin of price adjustment directly related to costs isn't vary large.
Incidentally,/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, has something like $40 billion in cash. That's wealth. My employer has about $2 billion on hand. That's wealth, too. Sure, you could make an argument that it's wealth that belongs to the shareholders, but the whole company belongs to them - from the physical plant to the paper clips. But saying that it's the shareholder's money is like saying that public lands belong to the people - which acre in Nevada is yours?
The hole in part of your proposition is that, under normal conditions, "ownership" (in the form of stock) in a corporation is not a literal thing.
Gotta read it literally. No mention of redundancy. Of course, the missing (but, I guess, implied) extra sentence telling us that "only" half of our data would be gone wouldn't have killed them.
Ok, I can't find it. Where is the price and availability information? I actually looked at all 12(!) pages of the ad-infested "review", but I didn't see it. Of course, by the time I got to the third page, I was nearly blind from looking at Tom's typically piss-poor page design, so it should be easy to understand if I missed it.
"You sound like you are very sure, but you are wrong."
The OP wondered why there was no mention of video support for the iPod. My answer was because video was not supported. You told me that I was wrong because video works on your Archos. I told you to keep up with the discussion, that we were talking iPod. Then I agreed with you that there would probably be video support.
Weird - even though you missed the point of the subthread, I still agreed with your opinion, yet you're still tweaked.
But you must first pray at the altar of SaintZonk, which I know is something that nobody would be willing to do.
When I was in college, I made an offering to the great white alter of SaintZonk most Friday nights. You are right, though, I wasn't really willing, as much as forced...the offering had to go somewhere.
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on "performance at rated speed"?
When a module is designed, particularly an unbuffered module, the significant performance bottleneck is the command and address buses. That's because each chip on the module presents an electrical load to the chipset driver. There are other variables at work as well, such as trace balancing, termination and impedance matching, but loading almost always has the biggest effect.
The command and address bus timing is measured in relation to the clock. The clock is running either two or four times faster than command and address and (in an unbuffered module) has either 50% or 33% of the loading of the command and address buses. In an ideal system, the command and address buses are positioned so that the clock occurs in the middle of the bit pulse.
In the real world, there is some variation in manufacturing of the chipset, the motherboard, the module and the memory parts. So, that positioning of the command and address buses will vary somewhat and that's the 3% variation that the module manufacturer is talking about. Normally, it means nothing because, as you said, the module works or it doesn't. But when you start overclocking the module, it makes a difference because that 3% variation in performance is measured at a given frequency. When the frequency changes, the behavior of the signals on the motherboard and modules begin to change. A system that is well-behaved at one clock speed may be unstable at another, due to electrical reflections that exist in all modules. As the clock speed changes, the nodes of those reflections move up and down the traces (which behave like electrical transmission lines, not wires). At some point, a node will be close enough to the memory part that a reflection will be able to increase the voltage overshoot to a point that causes the memory part to fail because of an overvoltage situation or may dampen the voltage enough that the memory part will fail to switch properly. It could also induce a "double switch" or a ringback that will cause the memory part to enter an unknown state. All of that means a failure.
That's just a quick summary - there's a lot more to the issue and, at least for the modules that I work on, I perform electrical simulations and measurments far in excess of the target data rate, just to get a handle on where the failure point of the module will be. But in real life, that failure point is going to have a fairly wide range. Like most things, when you push a device to its failure point, you'll find a rather broad range of performance.
I don't think that (outside of RMS) I've ever seen a post that actually spewed saliva and sweat! Good job!
Oh, and the software wasn't withdrawn - Best Buy decided not to purchase a license. But of course that was stated in the article and the press release.
I am anti-State, but I do believe that there can be a balance of harmony and government as long as the government is limited to a very small populace. I've been debating it with my anarcho-capitalist and libertarian friends, and I think the number falls somewhere in the area of 20,000-60,000 people.
You mean like the feudal city-states of Europe way back when?
The thing about talking to people who share your own views is that you tend to not explore dissenting ideas.
The sad thing is that I've actually seen guilds like "Nagas stole my bike" on my server. I've seen other various other "clever" uses of the word Naga (which is a mob in WoW) in guild names. So apparently it's okay to be racist in a subtle way but you can't be gay in a subtle way in WoW.
I guess I'm old or something...that doesn't make any sense to me. Seriously.
NAGA - designation of supernatural beings, snakedemons, sometimes represented in human form with a snake's hood in the neck, sometimes as mixed forms, half man half snake. They are distinguished by devout reverence toward the Buddha. Their sworn enemies are the Garuda, winged beings resembling the griffin.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).
Interesting that you should mention that. The engineering program at my local university exists almost entirely because of a huge endowment that my company made. We fund many scholarships and hire at least a hundred interns every year, just at one site - and rougly 75% of those interns receive job offers upon graduation.
However, a degree does not make experience, particularly in the area of signal integrity engineering. Even so, we have hired interns as full time engineers - three of them in the past five years. However, it's not possible to have a well-developed signal integrity program without engineers who have many years of experience.
Since you obviously aren't familiar with the field, I can tell you that, typically, a signal integrity engineer stays with the same company for years - often for his or her entire career. Experience is precious in the field and companies work to keep those engineers.
As far as the donating business setting the curriculum, that's not really true. The curriculum, at least for a BSEE, is fairly standard from school to school and is set to meet the standards of the ACE. Speaking from experience, there is very little room in an undergraduate engineer's schedule to provide meaningful university training in a specific field. We do use internships and co-op programs to fill in knowledge that we require, but a year-long internship is not the same as a year of full-time work experience - and it's nothing like the 5+ years of experience that we really look for in a simulation engineer.
Fortunately, we can use H1B visas to make up for the lack of experienced engineers who don't want to leave the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest.
-h-
considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees...
$130.00. Cheap at twice the price!
We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.
It's a shame, too, because you guys who won't consider anything more than 200 miles inland are missing out.
IT guys I don't know so much about - all of them (except for the freakin' loud Scottish guy) that I see around my building are from the US.
-h-
I didn't know we were living in a totalitarian state until I experienced it for myself.
/.
When you really live in a totalitarian state, you'll know it - you won't be able to make comments like that.
I know I shouldn't be, but I'm still amazed at the hyperbole and hysteria on
To use your own example you don't simulate in flight emergencies on real flights. You do it in a controlled environment usually in a simulator. If you don't have access to that or want to do more realistic simulations you're very careful about recovery conditions (eg. you simulate an engine failure by throttling back to idle, but you don't actually cut your engine).
Unfortunately, there are plenty of situations where training has to occur in situ for it to be realistic. Obviously you're not going to perform in situ training that creates a life or death situation and this case wasn't one. At worst, it has the potential to create a very inconvenient situation and I guess that this case turned out to be just that.
As an example of in situ training, when I served in the US Navy, we had the capability of injecting simulated sensor data into the real-time sensor stream of our sonar system. The data is indistinguishable from the real thing, so the potential exists for that information to go out over the world-wide tactical data system. It was an excellent tool for training and to make sure that operators were actually paying attention to the screen - generally speaking, on a surface ship sonar watches are brutally boring, unless there is an actual target to prosecute. The downside to the tool is that if it's not used properly, a whole lot of panic can ensue for a short time (and, since shit rolls downhill...)
That particular training tool was very successful, by the way. It increased the proficiency of the operators significantly.
-h-
I should have asked if it was random or not, but at those moments, the desire to not irritate the people with the power to make your day go badly overrides my curiosity.
I asked - I couldn't help myself. It's both random and if there's suspicion of funny business. I travel with some medical equipment in a small case. It almost always gets the sniffer treatment because it looks a little suspicious. Now and then my briefcase gets the same treatment. After a couple of times of that, I asked. They pick every X number of bags to sniff, plus anything that the X-ray screener flags.
-h-
Oh boy, you just opened the door for the clove cigarette smoking, beret wearing theorists to start expounding their utterly improbably drivel about the nature of man in the consumer society.
/. - how dare you?
Air America needs them to listen to their radios instead of reading
Shame on you.
And it works.
But only 30 hours per week.
I keed, I keed...
How does Bonjour compare to Univeral Plug-n-Play (besides probably being more secure, given UPnP's reputation)?
It's much more hip and cool. And it smokes French cigarettes.
Your last sentence makes my point. If you own one share of Microsoft, you own it - a share. You own a share that represents some fraction of the value of the company. But what do you own? A tire on one of the company cars? A few cases of paper? A copy of Windows XP? Even if you owned a controlling interest, what do you own? You own an abstraction of the value of the company. Can you take your share of Microsoft stock to Redmond and ask for your 10e-9th fraction of the assets of the company? Nope. But you can sell that abstraction to somebody else.
The stock represents the assets, profits and losses of the company. It implies ownership, but it is not ownership in the classic sense. You own a share of MSFT. You own and interest in MSFT. Maybe you even own a controlling interest in MSFT. But what do you own? What can you do with that portion of MSFT that you claim you own? Well...nothing, really. You can vote your proxy, I guess, but that's about it. Oh, and you can sell it. But you can't touch the assets that are owned by Microsoft. So who really owns the assets?
Your argument that MS is merely an organizational construct is also a red herring. Volition, sentience - that has nothing to do with ownership. Here's another example of why you're wrong. I owned several houses. I transferred the title to those houses to a corporation. My wife and I own the corporation. The corporation owns the houses. Do I own 50% of the houses? No - I own 50% of the corporation. I can direct the disposal of the assets of the corporation, but they are not my direct assets. If I sell the houses, turn it all into cash, then I own a corporation that has a lot of cash. But which dollar is mine and which is my wife's? What can I do with the assets of that corporation? Can I just take the money and run? Believe me, if I started dipping into the assets of the corporation by using the excuse that I own 50% of it, so 50% of its assets are mine, there will be legal (not to mention tax) trouble like you wouldn't believe! On the other hand, I can, under certain circumstances, sell my 50% interest in the corporation, the value of which may or may not be limited purely to the value of the houses.
As a corporate officer, I still have to pay the bills on behalf of the corporation. But that does not make the assets of the corporation my assets, nor does it diminish the corporation's ownership of its assets. Same with your stock.
The bottom line is that stock is merely an abstraction of the company.
Oh, and the first line of my original reply was sarcasm.
-h-
Have you never used a Thinkpad? There IS great PC hardware out there if you are willing to look for it.
Well, they used to be good. The Lenovo stuff is more than a little plastic-y.
-h-
Now that's almost funnier than the original!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
Yeah, and the gold fringe around the flag means that it's an admiralty court, so it has no jurisdiction over you.
/.'s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, has something like $40 billion in cash. That's wealth. My employer has about $2 billion on hand. That's wealth, too. Sure, you could make an argument that it's wealth that belongs to the shareholders, but the whole company belongs to them - from the physical plant to the paper clips. But saying that it's the shareholder's money is like saying that public lands belong to the people - which acre in Nevada is yours?
Every expense is part of the profit/loss statement. No surprise there. But this isn't a commodity business, so prices don't move in direct relation to those expenses. If all that it took to deal with an increase in expenses was a corresponding increase in prices, then no company would ever post a loss. The hitch in that plan is that most pricing is driven by the marketplace as opposed to being simply a "cost plus" proposition.
The whole wealth and class warfare business is just a red herring. You can apply the same rhetoric to any expense that a company pays. It's just the cost of doing business. If your costs are low enough, you make money. If they're not, you lose money. In a competitive market, the margin of price adjustment directly related to costs isn't vary large.
Incidentally,
The hole in part of your proposition is that, under normal conditions, "ownership" (in the form of stock) in a corporation is not a literal thing.
-h-
Gotta read it literally. No mention of redundancy. Of course, the missing (but, I guess, implied) extra sentence telling us that "only" half of our data would be gone wouldn't have killed them.
Ok, I can't find it. Where is the price and availability information? I actually looked at all 12(!) pages of the ad-infested "review", but I didn't see it. Of course, by the time I got to the third page, I was nearly blind from looking at Tom's typically piss-poor page design, so it should be easy to understand if I missed it.
-d-
Allow me to refresh your memory:
"You sound like you are very sure, but you are wrong."
The OP wondered why there was no mention of video support for the iPod. My answer was because video was not supported. You told me that I was wrong because video works on your Archos. I told you to keep up with the discussion, that we were talking iPod. Then I agreed with you that there would probably be video support.
Weird - even though you missed the point of the subthread, I still agreed with your opinion, yet you're still tweaked.
-h-
Typical AC BS - shoot the messenger. It's unfortunate, but what you said was true.
But you must first pray at the altar of SaintZonk, which I know is something that nobody would be willing to do.
When I was in college, I made an offering to the great white alter of SaintZonk most Friday nights. You are right, though, I wasn't really willing, as much as forced...the offering had to go somewhere.
-h-
We're talking iPod here, son. Keep up.
I suppose that there's a good chance that video will be available for the iPod, but it's not there now.
Rockbox seems to have lots of support for audio (though not much use when I use solely mp3) but doesn't mention video.
For good reason - it doesn't support video.
Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on "performance at rated speed"?
When a module is designed, particularly an unbuffered module, the significant performance bottleneck is the command and address buses. That's because each chip on the module presents an electrical load to the chipset driver. There are other variables at work as well, such as trace balancing, termination and impedance matching, but loading almost always has the biggest effect.
The command and address bus timing is measured in relation to the clock. The clock is running either two or four times faster than command and address and (in an unbuffered module) has either 50% or 33% of the loading of the command and address buses. In an ideal system, the command and address buses are positioned so that the clock occurs in the middle of the bit pulse.
In the real world, there is some variation in manufacturing of the chipset, the motherboard, the module and the memory parts. So, that positioning of the command and address buses will vary somewhat and that's the 3% variation that the module manufacturer is talking about. Normally, it means nothing because, as you said, the module works or it doesn't. But when you start overclocking the module, it makes a difference because that 3% variation in performance is measured at a given frequency. When the frequency changes, the behavior of the signals on the motherboard and modules begin to change. A system that is well-behaved at one clock speed may be unstable at another, due to electrical reflections that exist in all modules. As the clock speed changes, the nodes of those reflections move up and down the traces (which behave like electrical transmission lines, not wires). At some point, a node will be close enough to the memory part that a reflection will be able to increase the voltage overshoot to a point that causes the memory part to fail because of an overvoltage situation or may dampen the voltage enough that the memory part will fail to switch properly. It could also induce a "double switch" or a ringback that will cause the memory part to enter an unknown state. All of that means a failure.
That's just a quick summary - there's a lot more to the issue and, at least for the modules that I work on, I perform electrical simulations and measurments far in excess of the target data rate, just to get a handle on where the failure point of the module will be. But in real life, that failure point is going to have a fairly wide range. Like most things, when you push a device to its failure point, you'll find a rather broad range of performance.
-h-
So definition number two means talking dirty?
I don't think that (outside of RMS) I've ever seen a post that actually spewed saliva and sweat! Good job!
Oh, and the software wasn't withdrawn - Best Buy decided not to purchase a license. But of course that was stated in the article and the press release.
-h-
I am anti-State, but I do believe that there can be a balance of harmony and government as long as the government is limited to a very small populace. I've been debating it with my anarcho-capitalist and libertarian friends, and I think the number falls somewhere in the area of 20,000-60,000 people.
You mean like the feudal city-states of Europe way back when?
The thing about talking to people who share your own views is that you tend to not explore dissenting ideas.
-h-
The sad thing is that I've actually seen guilds like "Nagas stole my bike" on my server. I've seen other various other "clever" uses of the word Naga (which is a mob in WoW) in guild names. So apparently it's okay to be racist in a subtle way but you can't be gay in a subtle way in WoW.
I guess I'm old or something...that doesn't make any sense to me. Seriously.
NAGA - designation of supernatural beings, snakedemons, sometimes represented in human form with a snake's hood in the neck, sometimes as mixed forms, half man half snake. They are distinguished by devout reverence toward the Buddha. Their sworn enemies are the Garuda, winged beings resembling the griffin.